


Faces In The Crowd

by geckoholic



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Chance Meetings, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 21:16:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7377733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karen gets a reluctant day off the weekend before a holiday and almost meets an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faces In The Crowd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [templeandarche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/templeandarche/gifts).



> One of the things you said you liked was "small, internal exploration fics that explore a character's headspace", and I hope this qualifies. I wanted to write you something larger and all around bigger in scope (and, you know, actually get them together) but I didn't get around to rewatching the season and didn't want do attempt anything longer without doing just that, so I apologize. I hope you'll like this little thing regardless! :)
> 
> Beta-read by shenshen77. Thank you!! ♥ All remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title is from "Devil May Cry" by The Weeknd

Most days, Karen walks to work. The Bulletin isn't quite around the corner from her apartment, but she lost the ability to sleep in some time between finding a coworker's dead body in her living room and finding out that she's worked for Daredevil this past year. Every morning, she wakes when the city outside her window is still a familiar dark silhouette, gray-scale but sprinkled with dots of colored light from shops and stores and billboards. No sense staying in bed, giving the monsters she only just left behind in her dreams a chance to devour her again, and so she gets up, showers and puts on makeup and does her hair. She walks out in the dark. There are monsters here too, but they're different, easier defeated by logic and distractions. 

Ellison glances at her when she enters the Bulletin's office, eyebrows raised, and gives her a look that's half pride and half pity. But he's got no leg to stand on. He's here before she arrives, every day. Maybe he's right; whatever's in him, whatever's been in Urich, is in her too. Karen has yet to decide whether or not that's a good thing. 

Not all her cases are as spectacular as uncovering The Punisher's backstory, and there are days where she stays in the office, chasing after statements from elusive press representatives of the police and city hall and various shady companies. Roughly forty percent of the work in investigative journalism, she learned pretty quickly, is being hung up on during various stages of a phone conversation. But Karen is persistent, and she is stubborn, and she is creative. She almost always finds another way. 

It's the Friday before a long Fourth of July weekend and it's a slow news week, few things more exciting than traffic violations and holiday events going on. Ellison sends her home early, ignores the pointed glare she aims at him in reply. He waves a hand. 

“Page,” he says. “There's a holiday coming up. Buy some pie and some greasy food. You're young, go out dancing. Whatever you kids do these days. You'll find something to do.” 

She stares back for a couple more moments, but she learned rather quickly that he's only receptive to her begging and nagging when they're talking a case. With a huff, she clicks to power down her work station and grabs her bag. As she marches out of the office, she tries to remember the last time she left this building while the sun was still out. She comes up short. 

Her phone beeps while she stands at an intersection, trying to decide whether she'll stroll back home on autopilot and go back out later to buy some holiday food and at least attempt a normal holiday. She fishes it out of her bag and swipes to make the message appear: a short text from Foggy, wishing her a Happy Forth, complete with fireworks emojis and a thumbs-up. She texts back – _thanks, right back at u_ , with a grinning emoji – and decides, hey fuck it, the earlier she's done with preparing the whole holiday spiel, the earlier she can go home and spend the whole weekend in her PJ's, watching parades and eating overpriced ice cream. She rolls her shoulders and faces downtown, decisively walking off with the crowd when the traffic light goes green. 

 

***

 

There's a strange safety in being on the run, a real fugitive from the law. While he was in holding, Frank had wondered what might happen. Whether they'll lock him away, or maybe let him go. It wasn't hope, exactly. Hope had died with his family. But without a definitive verdict, there was a _possibility_. And that's gone now. He knows where he'll go if they find him. He also knows they aren't looking too hard; it's been a while since he'd made headlines, and the police don't seem overly keen to catch him again. He still keeps to thugs and murderers. They have bigger fish to fry now, actual innocents to protect. 

Sometimes, when he walks through the streets, wearing jeans and a simple hoodie, he might catch the eye of a stranger, an elderly woman or a young man carrying a suitcase, and he knows they recognized him. But there's no shock, no panicked screech. A few of them avert their eyes and step aside. Some others nod and smile. Most simply ignore him and walk on. He's no threat to them, and they know that. Were they to fall down in a dark alleyway, they wouldn't have to fear him. And if the cause for their fall would have been another, someone with bad intentions, he might even save them. He's a wild animal in their midst. But as long as he doesn't run rabid on the sheep and keeps to the other wolves, no one quite cares. 

And so he blends into the crowd that hides him, tolerates him, for as long as he proves to be their guard rather than their predator. There's blood under his fingernails, remnants from last night he didn't care to put much effort into purging, hidden under long sleeves. He knows it's July 3rd and the flurry downtown has a different quality to it, like everyone's putting in the last push before the holiday arrives. Frank has never been big on holidays, and this is part of why. He liked the ones that were about making his kid happy, Christmas and Easter and birthdays and all that, but the ordered festiveness of days like these always seemed superfluous to him. Stress before, stress after, and the day hardly ever lives up to what people planned. He willfully ignores the displays with the red-white-and-blue cakes and the barbeque food and grabs a couple of ready meals, some soda, and a box of cereal. Avoids the cameras as has become habit, and heads for the checkout. 

He almost runs into her, but manages to slow his steps and course-correct in time, able to retreat and watch from a distance. 

Karen stands in the frozen food aisle with her arms crossed in front of her chest, staring down the food on offer like it personally offended her. A basket filled with microwave popcorn, potato chips, prepackaged chicken escalopes and frozen vegetables sits by her feet. She reaches for a box of ice cream, but halts mid-air, head cocked to the side, reconsidering, like picking between cookie dough deluxe and mango sorbet is the hardest decision she ever had to make in her life. 

Frank knows for a fact that's not the case. 

He keeps watching her, feeling slightly like a creeper but unable to either walk on or march over there and say hello, as she sighs and picks the cookie dough ice cream _and_ the sorbet and a package of brightly colored popsicles to boot. A young mother with a freckled boy of about five shakes her head at the indulgence. Karen glares her down in passing. Her heels click on the cheap linoleum as she heads for the checkout, leaving his line of sight. 

He loiters around the dairy goods for a few minutes, grabs some yoghurt he knows will likely go bad before he remembers he bought it, and doesn't stroll in the direction of the checkout for another couple of minutes. There'll be a time and a place for them to meet again, but a supermarket isn't it.

Not when the last time they saw each other from less than a fifty feet distance, he shot people right in front of her.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://lostemotion.tumblr.com).


End file.
